State board to distribute $7.3 million to districts solely for technology.

As Congress returns to work this week, prospects for passage of the
Workforce and Career Development bill are dim, congressional observers
say.

After nearly an entire session of legislative work, the lack of
support for the bill might mean a lull in efforts to consolidate scores
of federally supported job-training programs and to give greater
control to the states and localities through block-grant funding.

Only a determined push by Sen. Nancy Landon Kassebaum, R-Kan., a
leading proponent of HR 1617 and the chairwoman of the Senate Labor and
Human Resources Committee, and the acquiescence of Majority Leader
Trent Lott, R-Miss., who sets the Senate's calendar, might bring the
bill to a vote in that chamber, those following the measure say.
(Please see " Lack of Progress Could
Imperil Voc.-Ed Bill," May 29, 1996.)

The Senate must pass the bill before the House will consider it.

Senate rules, however, give opponents ample procedural tools to
block the bill. When the House-Senate conference committee approved the
final bill on July 17, Democratic members led by Sen. Edward M. Kennedy
of Massachusetts all voted against it.

And conservative groups like the St. Louis-based Eagle Forum, which
has likened the bill to centralized economic planning, could turn some
Republican legislators, especially in the House, away from it. Then
there is the possibility of a veto by President Clinton--the bill would
eliminate his pet school-to-work program in 1998--which does little to
drum up enthusiasm.

Time is dwindling, as Congress has no more than 17 working days to
consider a large number of bills, including defense-appropriations and
banking-insurance legislation, before it adjourns on Sept. 28 until
after the November elections.

Effort Shows Consensus

Analysts who have followed the bill seem to have already conceded
its defeat.

If the two-year effort leading up to the workforce bill, which would
reauthorize federal vocational-education programs, has achieved
anything, observers say, it highlighted a broad consensus that the
nation's patchwork of federally supported job-training programs needs
to be streamlined.

Among the bill's benefits, said Ray O. Worden, the executive
director of the New Hampshire Job Training Council in Concord, would be
to simplify compliance with federal regulations. Mr. Worden, who
administers "half a dozen major workforce programs," said he is
"constantly wasting money making competing regulations fit together--I
was hoping it would reduce the paperwork."

But translating that consensus into a piece of legislation became
garbled by the many interests involved, said Vic Klatt, the education
coordinator for the House Committee on Economic and Educational
Opportunities. Mr. Klatt said he and others working on the bill
underestimated just how many groups would want some say in the
measure--governors, state legislators, local officials, mayors, school
districts, disability organizations, businesses, and labor unions.

The bill became a "massive social reform," Mr. Klatt said, one that
is obviously tough to accomplish in an election year.

If the bill dies, Mr. Klatt, a Republican, specifically faults the
Clinton administration. He said the administration switched its
position "about a dozen different times in the process" and never
submitted its own plan.

But he also said business groups "dropped the ball" on the reform
effort because "they failed to make their priorities clear on both
sides of the aisle and to make their individual congressmen and -women
know how important these programs are to them."

Marion Pines, the director of the Center for Social Policy Studies
at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, disagreed that business
groups were inactive. She speculated that the bill ultimately ran
aground on fundamental disagreements over who would control the
programs: Democrats generally wanted stronger control at both the
federal and local levels; Republicans wanted more control in the hands
of governors.

AVA's Role

Nancy O'Brien, an official of the American Vocational Association in
Alexandria, Va., said her group, which represents vocational educators,
lobbied to ensure specific federal support for vocational education in
the bill. She considered it an achievement that the bill would give
vocational-education programs separate funding--26 percent of the block
grant--that could not be transferred to other activities; it would make
similar provisions for adult education. Although she said the level of
funding would be too low, "we can survive under this structure." AVA
argued that 28 percent would maintain current funding levels.

Howard Rosen, the executive director of the Competitiveness Policy
Council, an economic think tank in Washington, sees the bill's
declining fortunes as representative of the nation's ambivalent
commitment to job training.

Some observers said last week that if the bill falls from the
congressional agenda this year, the nation's job-training system might
have missed a rare chance to draw the full attention of Congress. Mr.
Klatt noted that in the next Congress, the House subcommittee concerned
with job training and vocational education is the same panel that will
be occupied with the reauthorization of federal higher education
programs.

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